defaults in genereated settings.py are absolute paths for template directories, media directories and media urls

[Jacques Mattheij <j@…>]

'best practice' seems to be to use

import os

OUR_ROOT = os.path.realpath(
    os.path.dirname(__file__)
)

MEDIA_ROOT = os.path.join(OUR_ROOT, 'media')

MEDIA_URL = '/media/'

TEMPLATE_DIRS = (
    # Put strings here, like "/home/html/django_templates" or "C:/www/django/templates".
    # Always use forward slashes, even on Windows.
    # Don't forget to use absolute paths, not relative paths.
    os.path.join(OUR_ROOT, 'templates')
)

Shouldn't the automatically generated settings.py file include these things right from the beginning ?

It can take a newbie like me a long time to figure out all these little details required to make a project relocatable.

[Jacques Mattheij <j@…>]

two weeks and not out of triage ?

[Alex Gaynor]

Marking as DDN. It could also be considered a dupe of #694.

[Aymeric Augustin]

This is a duplicate of #16504 which was closed as wontfix.

I have mixed feelings about this idea.

While it would make the initial setup of a new project slightly faster and more-beginner friendly, I really, really don't want people to store uploaded data (media files) next to code in production. This is prone to awful misconfigurations — from making the Python code writable by the webserver to serving uninterpreted Python files from the web root, and probably several others.

Since we can't guess what a good location would be (maybe /var/www/media, /var/www/{{ projectname }}/media, D:\\media, ...), the default is empty.